A tug-of-war over biased AI – Axios

Why it matters: This debate will define the future of the controversial AI systems that help determine people's fates through hiring, underwriting, policing and bail-setting.

What's happening: Despite the rise of the bias-blockers in 2019, the bias-fixers remain the orthodoxy.

The other side: At the top academic conference for AI this week, Abeba Birhane of University College Dublin presented the opposing view.

The big picture: In a recent essay, Frank Pasquale, a UMD law professor who studies AI, calls this a new wave of algorithmic accountability that looks beyond technical fixes toward fundamental questions about economic and social inequality.

The bottom line: Technology can help root out some biases in AI systems. But this rising movement is pushing experts to look past the math to consider how their inventions will be used beyond the lab.

The impact: Despite a flood of money and politics propelling AI forward, some researchers, companies and voters hit pause this year.

But the question at the core of the debate is whether a fairness fix even exists.

The swelling backlash says it doesn't especially when companies and researchers ask machines to do the impossible, like guess someone's emotions by analyzing facial expressions, or predict future crime based on skewed data.

This blowback's spark was a 2017 research project from MIT's Joy Buolamwini. She foundthat major facial recognition systems struggled to identify female and darker-toned faces.

What's next: Companies are tightening access to their AI algorithms, invoking intellectual property protections to avoid sharing details about how their systems arrive at critical decisions.

The rest is here:

A tug-of-war over biased AI - Axios

Related Posts

Comments are closed.